How Well Does Contemporary Fiction Address Radical Politics?

September 17, 2013

Bookends

Each week in Bookends, two writers take on pressing and provocative questions about the world of books. This week, Pankaj Mishra and Jennifer Szalai discuss the representation of extreme political ideas in fiction.

By Pankaj Mishra

Fiction by women seems the most sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radicalism.

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Pankaj Mishra

In the 1930s, many politically engaged writers in the West were engrossed by André Malraux’s “Conquerers” and “Man’s Fate,” both set amid the turmoil of the Chinese Revolution. Malraux was one of the first novelists to reckon with two new 20th-century realities: the revolt of the masses and the power of ideology. Aligned with working-class movements, his smart, self-aware characters made the conspirators of Joseph Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes” and Henry James’s “Princess Casamassima” seem like petty and irrelevant hecklers of an imperturbable bourgeois order. But Malraux still found himself attacked by Leon Trotsky, who said the French novelist was too much of a bourgeois individualist, and not Marxist enough to comprehend the great events he was part of.

An equivalent accusation was brought against many writers engaged with the energies, both liberationist and nihilist, released by anticolonial movements and the arduous process of state-building in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Fortunately, these breakers of long national silences (including Indonesia’s Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Chile’s Roberto Bolaño) were less compelled by Marxist dogma than by the nobility of individual passion for justice and dignity. The antiapartheid activists of Nadine Gordimer’s “Burger’s Daughter,” the Trotskyist revolutionary of Mario Vargas Llosa’s “Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” and the low-caste opponent of Communist government in Arundhati Roy’s “God of Small Things” show how the wish for radical innovation has been diversely realized, and often corrupted, but never less than urgent.

This longing for an alternative order could not have been similarly commemorated in post-World War II American fiction. While other countries struggled with genocides, military coups and economic calamities, the United States saw an unprecedented period of prosperity, nearing what Carl Schmitt called a state of “neutralization”: the end of struggles between rival ideologies and systems, and the rise of a politics dominated by experts and mass persuaders.

Writing as the clamorous protests of the 1960s faded away, Philip Roth seemed almost envious of writers in Communist Eastern Europe, who had gained moral prestige and authority through their perilous defiance of repressive governments: “There,” he wrote, “nothing goes and everything matters; here everything goes and nothing matters.”

The American novelist’s unease about his comfortable isolation, frequently expressed through reflexive irony, rarely flowed into an empathetic understanding of those intractably embodying the will to change at home. In “American Pastoral,” Roth himself seemed to equate political radicalism with a form of lunacy. The vicious attacks of Sept. 11 could only strengthen the tendency to see militant dissent as a species of pathology.

Confronted with the facts of mass politics and ideological fervor, John Updike and Martin Amis psychologized them away as symptoms of sexual frustration. Presumably free of male anxieties, fiction by women — Deborah Eisenberg, Jennifer Egan, Susan Choi, Barbara Kingsolver, Ann Patchett, Dana Spiotta — has seemed much more sensitive to the variety, ambiguities and contradictions of radical thought and action. (Depicting Robespierre in “A Place of Greater Safety,” Hilary Mantel may have given us contemporary fiction’s richest portrait of a revolutionary.) Remarkably, almost all events and characters in these works are drawn from the past. But then the few people pushed to radical gestures in our own era of unparalleled conformity and political passivity are more likely to be scorned than admired.

More ominously, the future holds none of the possibilities of far-reaching transformation that galvanized a writer like Bolaño. Indeed, his example shows that Trotsky, unreasonably doctrinaire with Malraux, was right in one respect: The writer chronicling political events in fiction is most effective when participating in a historical process or movement. No such tonic immersion is available to most contemporary writers, who, as sequestered as ever, must strive alone to transcend the general impoverishment of the political imagination.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of several books, including “The Romantics: A Novel,” which won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and “From the Ruins of Empire,” a finalist for the Orwell and Lionel Gelber Prizes in 2013. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and contributes essays on politics and literature to The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Guardian of London and The London Review of Books.

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By Jennifer Szalai

Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Jennifer Szalai

Despite America’s recent political and economic depredations, our fiction tends to locate subversion in other eras or other places.

If we were to deduce what reality looks like from the fiction that gets read the most, politics would seem to be less real to us than king slayers and Dante fanatics. This isn’t to say political intrigue is missing from best-seller lists; thriller writers often use it to set a plot in motion, deploying it as a backdrop or a pretext. But “the political novel,” which the critic Irving Howe defined in terms of “a dominant emphasis, a significant stress,” is more elusive. It always has been. Writing in the late 1950s, Howe was talking about the rare work of fiction in which the political element “is interesting enough to warrant investigation.” Restless, radicalized characters offer one reliable way of making things “interesting enough.” Characters taking pleasure in the political status quo generally don’t.

The novelist Ian McEwan has tried to combine the two, depicting radical politics from the perch of a decidedly nonradical protagonist. In “Saturday,” a wealthy neurosurgeon thinks deep thoughts about terrorism and Sept. 11. He diagnoses the malady of radical discontent with confident ease: antiwar protesters are animated by their “cloying self-regard,” and terrorists are driven to murder by their foolish commitment to “mirages” like “the ideal Islamic state.” Radical politics in all forms gets cast as either a vanity project or a logical error. “Saturday” reads like a tribute to upper-middle-class values — a bourgeois manifesto of sorts.

Fiction can address radical politics at a genteel remove, as McEwan does, treating it like a curiosity to be looked at and commented on. While this kind of loftiness may be a legitimate goal for a social scientist, it seems weirdly limiting for a fiction writer, who has the freedom to imagine himself into the lives of others, to become someone else. Writers like Norman Rush and Deborah Eisenberg have long handled politics in their fiction with exceptional sensitivity and intelligence, refracting pristine ideas through the unruly subjectivity of their characters. Similarly, in Rachel Kushner’s recent novel “The Flamethrowers,” set in the 1970s, an American falls in with Italian radicals for reasons that are only obliquely political: after chancing on her boyfriend with another woman, she tries to lose herself in the righteous slogans of others, joining a movement she knows “little to nothing about.” Yet her reasons aren’t entirely self-absorbed; she’s too observant for that. At her boyfriend’s palatial family home, she notices the casual “cruelty” of expecting “a servant in uniform not just to bring your coffee but also to pour it.”

Howe suggested that a real understanding of politics — a feeling for even extreme political ideas and their seductive power — comes with an existential crisis, in which people feel themselves at the mercy of “large impersonal forces over which they can claim little control.” With the exception of the Civil War, he argued, Americans could always count on a “way out.” Thomas Pynchon’s homegrown paranoiacs have since struggled to subvert what the author once called the “emerging technopolitical order,” and Don DeLillo has positioned his solitary characters against the mass market and the faceless crowd. But despite the political and economic depredations of the last 50 years, much contemporary American fiction tends to locate political subversion in other eras or other places. So it’s striking when writers train their gaze on us, looking closely at what happens here, at how pretensions to inclusiveness can still leave people feeling invisible and estranged. Sometimes the political action is explicit, as in the smart, scathing fiction of Kiran Desai, but some of the most startling work sticks closer to the intimacy of experience. I’m thinking of the quietly astonishing stories of Edward P. Jones, or the funny and pointed brilliance of “Americanah,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s new novel: their characters may have no interest whatsoever in revolution, but they are finely attuned to the ironies that can give rise to one, to the discrepancies we don’t even know are there.

Jennifer Szalai was until 2010 a senior editor at Harper’s Magazine, where she oversaw the publication’s “Reviews” section. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Nation and The London Review of Books, among others.